His wife, Iola, suggested that the quar-


tet perform on college campuses, which produced a nationwide sensation, with re- cord sales to match. “We reached them musically,” he told


The New York Times in 1967. “We had no singers, no beards, no jokes. All we present- ed was music.” With their curly hair and horn-rimmed


glasses, Desmond and Brubeck looked like professorial brothers and were unlikely jazz stars. The two had an instant musical bond and could anticipate each other’s bandstand improvisations, as Desmond’s ethereal, upper-register saxophone soared above Bru- beck’s driving keyboard attack. With the release of “Time Out” in


1959, Brubeck had the first jazz album to sell more than 1 million copies. It reached No. 2 on the pop charts, and its eternally catchy signature tune, “Take Five,” became a surprise hit.


The tune, written by Desmond but heavily arranged by Brubeck, built a memo- rable melody over a complex rhythm in the unusual time signature of 5/4. “Take Five” became a staple of his concerts and helped make the Dave Brubeck Quartet the most popular jazz group of the 1950s and ‘60s. “Every once in a while,” jazz historian


and critic Ted Gioia wrote in an e-mail ex- change with The Washington Post, “jazz is blessed by one of those great figures who can do it all. They give us a body of work that is full of musical riches ... but the music also can appeal to the average listener. Dave Brubeck is one of those figures.”


Diplomat Of Jazz Brubeck’s position in musical history


has often been debated. He was born the same year as Charlie Parker, the tortured ge- nius of the bebop movement who brought a new rhythmic and harmonic sophistication to jazz in the 1940s, but Brubeck was never a true bebopper. He defied the raffish image of the jazz musician by being a clean-living family man who lived with his wife and six children. He was considered a seminal force in the West Coast’s understated “Cool Jazz”


MARCH 2013


school of the 1950s, but he disdained the “Cool Jazz” label and preferred to forge an original musical path. After early struggles, Brubeck was re-


portedly earning more than $100,000 a year by 1954, the year he became the second jazz musician to be featured on the cover of Time magazine (after Louis Armstrong in 1949). Some musicians and critics openly re-


sented his success, and others questioned his prominence in a form of music that was cre- ated primarily by black musicians. But Brubeck was an outspoken advo- cate of racial harmony and often used his music as a platform for cross-cultural un- derstanding. He once canceled 23 of 25 concerts in the South when local officials would not allow his African-American bass player, Eugene Wright, to appear with the rest of the group. On a tour in the Netherlands in the 1950s, African-American


pianist Willie


“The Lion” Smith was asked, in Brubeck’s presence, “Isn’t it true that no white man can play jazz?” Without answering at first, Smith ges-


tured toward Brubeck and said to the re- porter, “I’d like you to meet my son.” In 1958, Brubeck and his quartet un-


dertook an arduous international tour for the State Department, spreading the im- provisatory spirit of jazz to Iran, Iraq, Af- ghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Sri Lanka, among other countries. In Poland they were among the first U.S. jazz musicians to per- form behind the Iron Curtain. In each new country, Brubeck mingled


with musicians, absorbing local rhythms and melodies. Long before the term “world music” gained currency, he was writing compositions that borrowed elements he had heard in Mexico, Japan, Turkey, India, Afghanistan and other countries. In 1988, Brubeck and his quartet per-


formed at a gala dinner at the U.S. ambassa- dor’s residence in Moscow during a summit meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. During “Take Five,” observers that Gorbachev


noticed was tapping


his fingers along with the music. “I can’t understand Russian,” Brubeck said


37


at the time, “but I can understand body language.” The next day, Gloyd, Brubeck’s man-


ager, told to The Washington Post 20 years later, that the next day, Secretary of State George P. Shultz “broke through the ranks, gave Dave a big hug and said, “Dave, you made the summit. No one was talking after three days. You made the breakthrough.”


A Cowboy Childhood


David Warren Brubeck was born Dec. 6, 1920, in Concord, Calif. He and his fam- ily lived on a 45,000-acre ranch near Ione, Calif.


His father was a champion rodeo roper


and his mother was a conservatory-trained pianist who had studied in London with concert star Dame Myra Hess. She gave her three sons a surprisingly advanced musical education, and Brubeck’s two older broth- ers, Henry and Howard, became music teachers and composers. Because of early eyesight problems, Br- ubeck always had difficulty reading musical notation. He compensated by learning to improvise and to play by ear, which served him well in jazz. At the University of the Pacific in


Stockton, Calif., Brubeck had planned to study veterinary medicine. But a zoology professor saw how much time he spent in the music department and suggested that the young Brubeck change majors. He worked as a pianist in clubs through


college, developing a powerful boogie-woo- gie style, but his sight-reading remained rudimentary at best. A dean called him a disgrace but allowed Brubeck to graduate after a professor pleaded on his behalf, call- ing him a budding genius. In college, Brubeck proposed on his first date with Iola Whitlock, and the two were married in 1942. She sometimes wrote lyrics for his music and managed their grow- ing household. During World War II, Brubeck was


pulled from the ranks of an infantry unit by an Army colonel, who asked him to start a jazz band to entertain troops on the front lines. The group he formed was perhaps the


TEMPO


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